Hillel Kagan has finished up the Great European Torah Scholar portraits he's been working on over at art process (a site where artists share the evolution of their work), using, as you'll recall, one of the images I scanned in from a Kupat Ha'ir brochure as a reference. The paintings, along with Hillel's documentation of their progression, will be shown next month (starting July 7) in Sicily at art process's first-ever offline exhibition.
Hillel was nice enough to send me his statement on the series:
Jewish tradition as we know it today was formed in Europe. In point of fact without the influence of Europe the Judaism that is practiced would be unknown. This melding of an ancient eastern religious cult with the west, despite the inherent conflicting ideologies and more importantly and more likely because of those conflicts has given birth to a great and vital tradition of tolerance and compassion. A culture of interpretation and differing ideas yet in the main tolerant to difference and contributory to the bettering of the world. For over a thousand years Rabbis, scholars and thinkers from Maimonides and Spinoza to Buber and Kafka and countless others, have benefited European culture even while under duress
from their neighbours. It's in the spirit of that contribution that I've created this series of paintings.
Oddly appropriate, then, that he referred to images of the 21st-century rabbis who seem to have dropped into Brooklyn directly from the time of Israel ben Eliezer. Of course, when Hillel contacted me looking for the brochure I could only find a very small image, so it couldn't have been too much help. But hey, I think I can still say I helped art!